Christmas shopping - you’ve got to love it, the festive buzz in the air, the hours of deliberation and stress over what to buy, the Christmas songs playing in every shop in town. Ok, well maybe not the songs. In fact, if there’s one thing I really cannot stand about the Silly Season, it’s the absolute stupidity of Christmas songs.
Like bad music of every sort, festive tunes are over-played, out-of-date and ridiculously cheesy. So why do high street stores drill these songs into our heads from mid-November? I suppose the big idea is to get us into the “festive mood”, so that we’ll all suddenly sprout a white fluffy beard, feel a huge urge to wear a red suit and buy millions of presents.
If Christmas tunes have any effect on me, it’s more likely to be to make me leg it out of the shop as fast as possible, just to get away from them. Ten minutes is about the limit for me – after that the incessant drone just within your level of hearing is too much for me to take.
In fact, that’s one of the most annoying things about them: that you’re only just aware that you can hear them. It’d be like a huge Santa Claus following you around the shop just within your eye-line. Sounds ridiculous? Tell that to the shop owners.
If they’re going to insist on playing festive tunes as soon as the weather gets a bit chilly, I reckon the least they could do would be to vary it a bit. I’ve heard Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You more times in the last week than I’ve had Christmas dinners in my whole life.
We need new musicians to reinvent the Christmas song so that we have some up-to-date material to freshen up the scene – I wouldn’t mind an Indie/ R‘n’B/ Ska take on Christmas – at least it would provide a bit of variety.
So, message to all musicians: stop messing around with your advent calendars and write us some proper tunes to brighten up our Christmas shopping days!
About this article
This article was produced by Ella Parry-Davies. It was published on the Reach for the Sky website.
